For many years and decades, the need for a memorial center at the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv has been discussed. On September 29-30, 1941, Nazi German Sonderkommando forces and local collaborators had murdered 33,771 Jews in the ravine. In 2016, the Ukrainian government announced together with an International Supervisory Board its intention to create an official Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC) on the grounds of the massacre. Since then, the political and historiographical mandate, the building, the historical narrative and the artistic concept to be developed, as well as the future Center's scholarly and artistic staff have been hotly disputed. Russia's aggression against Ukraine since 2014 and even more so Russia's war against Ukraine in February 2022, which included repeated air strikes on Ukraine's capital, made the further development and operation of the BYHMC difficult and partly impossible, last but not least for all practical purposes. The Center was officially founded and began its operations at the eightieth anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre in September 2021. However, the memorial complex itself still had to be built.
The present translation of an article by Shimon Briman analyzes a particular debate that surrounded the development plans for the memorial project in Kyiv at that time. The author sheds light on how the initially envisaged financial involvement of Russian businessmen in the project, whose relatives include Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust victims, caused the ongoing debate to become much more complex and heated against the backdrop of Russia's intention and actions to destroy Ukraine as an independent state. The original Russian-language article was first published in 2020 as "Voyny, demony i ambitsii Babyego yara" in the Russian Jewish magazine "Evreyskiy zhurnal" (Jewish Magazine) 6/5782 (15 May 2020), pp. 20-29, online accessible at: https://jewishmagazine.ru/articles/community/voyny-demony-
i-ambitsii-babego-yara/ (last accessed 15 December 2024).
Shimon Briman is a Ukrainian-Israeli historian and journalist. He currently serves as head of the East European Desk at the University of Haifa, Israel. The article was translated in 2020 and edited in 2024 by Nicolas Dreyer, Institute of Slavic Studies, Otto Friedrich University, Bamberg, Germany. A retrospective reading in 2024 necessitated an adaptation of the tenses employed in the original essay.